by Sue Williams
The school itself was a modest, newly constructed redbrick building at the back of the Gothic-style Our Lady of Lourdes Church, finished just six years earlier with funds raised by parishioners. Next door was the presbytery, converted from an old heritage-listed mansion, Cavendish House, fronting High Street, Prahran, in its own large grounds.
Classes were big and learning was mostly by rote but Bobby, eager to learn and endlessly inquisitive, liked the lessons. There’d been no books at home, so he was thrilled to discover a whole new world in those at school. He wasn’t so good at learning new words off by heart but found instead that once he knew their meaning, he’d start using them, and become familiar with them that way. He soon developed a vocabulary far more extensive and sophisticated than that of his classmates, who tended to learn words, but rarely introduce them into everyday conversation. He joined the choir too and found, to his surprise, that he was considered to have a very good singing voice. ‘His father had a good voice, and Bob has too,’ says his niece Peta.
At home, apart from his dutiful sister Kathleen, who continued taking him on occasional outings, no-one spent much time with him. Eileen, eleven years older, was too busy with her own life after leaving school and Jim was always out fishing and playing with his mates. Their mum tried to give Bobby attention but, at fifty-one, and still taking in work as a seamstress to make ends meet, she was always tired and a hard life had made her old before her time. And, of course, he didn’t want his dad to notice him any more than he could possibly help.
Bobby and his mother, Annie.
With Bobby’s mother a regular worshipper at the church, the new parish priest at Armadale, Father James McHugh, started taking an interest in him in his third year at the school. He was a kindly man from country Victoria, perceptive and with a good heart, who recognised that Bobby was struggling. He wasn’t the easiest of mentors, however, with a tendency to be brusque and often quite curt with the small boys around him. But when Bobby turned eight, the priest invited him, together with his mate Brian, to be an altar boy. Bobby, who’d been angling for such an entree, was delighted to be given such an important role. Even better, Father McHugh lent him a traditional black cassock and white cotta, the short version of the surplice, knowing his family wouldn’t be able to afford the right clothes.
Bobby and Brian Harman as altar boys.
‘We were poor, and we should never really have been on the altar,’ he says. ‘How I got there, I don’t know. I suppose I learnt over time to become more pushy. If you think you’re on to something, you go for it. Our Maguire motto is “Justitia et fortitudo invincibilia sunt” – “Justice and fortitude are invincible”, or “Virtue and perseverance are invincible”. Our family has always been a bit like that – pushy in the cause of what’s right.’
As an altar boy, he quickly found he liked the regime and the responsibilities, and relished being, for the first time, a part of a team. Being brought up a Catholic with his mum still a devout follower, he didn’t think too much about the religious side of things; he absorbed the faith and its beliefs almost by osmosis. He found he enjoyed serving at the altar, though, not only as a Catholic rite but also for the mateship with his fellow altar boys, its sense of occasion and the way, for the first time in his life, it made him feel important.
Even better, Father McHugh also offered him a regular job, for five shillings a week, cleaning up the church grounds and the toilet block out the back. Bobby gratefully accepted. Never having had any money of his own, he saw it as a great chance not only to help out his mum at home, but also to buy himself occasional treats, like cakes and comics. The priest always made a point too of inviting Bobby along on outings he arranged for the altar boys, such as picnics at Ferntree Gully and the football, to watch his team Richmond, paying the cost out of his own pocket for the boy. It was excellent timing. Bobby’s sister Kathleen still took him out occasionally, but she’d started courting an American serviceman stationed in Melbourne and she suddenly didn’t have as much time for her little brother anymore. Bobby quietly shifted his barracking loyalties from Kathleen’s Essendon to Father McHugh’s Richmond.
The war finally ended in Australia twelve days before Bobby’s eleventh birthday, with Japan signing an unconditional surrender. There was jubilation throughout Australia, and Melburnians flocked into the streets in displays of spontaneous celebration. It was a Sunday and Bobby and Brian had been playing in the trenches in the afternoon; they emerged to see everyone running out of their houses, with women waving their aprons and shouting, ‘The war’s over! The war’s over!’ Children were given the next day off school, and there were thanksgiving services at the church. Everyone hoped that life would be easier now. And it was, for a time. But for Bobby and his family, that time was all too short.
The year 1946 started out well. School was proving more and more enjoyable, Bobby was coming out of his shell a little more, and he was beginning to get a sense of having a life of his own. On 30 June, he had his confirmation at the church at the school, presided over by the formidable Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix, one of the most powerful figures in Australia at the time. It was a fittingly grand occasion, which his mother and Kathleen attended. At the service, the boys’ sponsor placed a hand on each candidate’s shoulder, for a physical sense of support. The message was that the youngster is leaving childhood to go out into the wider world but they are not alone. It was a message Bobby treasured.
For later that same year, his world started coming crashing down around his ears. His 21-year-old sister Kathleen, already grieving that her American boyfriend had been sent away to Sydney, fell ill. She took time off from her telephony job, but steadily grew sicker and sicker. Bobby remembers her quoting from her favourite ballad, ‘Danny Boy’: ‘ … the pipes, the pipes are calling, From glen to glen, and down the mountain side. The summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dying, ’Tis you, ’tis you must go and I must bide.’
She was finally diagnosed with ‘galloping consumption’, a particularly virulent form of TB. The family wondered if she’d caught it from the mouthpieces of the phones on the switchboard where she worked. Only a month later, she was dead. Two days after her death, a letter arrived from her American sweetheart. He’d been diagnosed with TB in hospital, he wrote. She should get herself checked out too.
The death of his favourite sister left a massive vacuum in Bobby’s life. He was devastated to lose the one person he was closest to in the world but, with the other members of his family all so consumed by their own grief, he had few places to turn. ‘Kathleen was a beautiful young woman, struck down in the prime of her life,’ he says. ‘As a kid, she’d held my hand and taken me out, and had always looked after me. She was always there for me. When she was gone, it was a huge shock.’
Bobby with his sister Kathleen.
Bobby rallied as best he could. He saw his mother become older and frailer almost overnight and he watched his father, always a heavy smoker, grow sick and then decline even deeper into his alcoholic haze. He could see his own future as a stark choice. On the one hand, he could give in, drop out and act up. There were plenty of temptations everywhere; lots of boys his own age, with a lot more going for them, were drifting into a life of crime. He saw he could easily become, like them, a victim of circumstance. Alternatively, he realised he could shape up and try to take charge of his own destiny as best he could, to become proactive in his life.
‘I think after losing Kathleen, that’s when I started to learn that I couldn’t depend on other people to look after me,’ he says. ‘I had to learn to look out for myself, to take responsibility myself for my own life.’ It was the early stirrings of his so-called ‘Do-It-Yourself, Bring Your Own’ philosophy that was to shape his viewpoint as he got older.
A lot of the kids he knew were becoming what were termed ‘juvenile delinquents’. Many were fatherless and grandfatherless because of the war, and had little discipline left in their homes, with their mothers and siblings preoccupied with their
own lives and worries. As a result, many were getting into trouble and being taken away from their families and sent to tough boys’ homes in an attempt to instil some restraint and control into them. He decided that was a fate he wanted to avoid at all costs, however miserable his own home life. So at the age of just turned twelve, he set out to make sure he and his mates stayed on the straight and narrow.
‘For some reason or another, sparked by some temporary unease in postwar society, we didn’t want to evolve into juvenile delinquents,’ he says. ‘I saw so many little kids go off like bottles of stale milk. People just didn’t expect much of us. So we came to some kind of a collective awareness that we, as little boys, may well end up in trouble like other little boys who we must have been hearing about, and were determined not to end up like them. So Brian and I and a couple of others banded together to do something about it. We made a pact: we weren’t going over to the darkness, we weren’t going to segue into delinquency. We must have realised that you can alter the ways things are, but that you’re not going to be able to do that just by wishful thinking. We had to take action, we had to take charge of our own destinies, rather than leave it to others.
‘We decided if we had a place to go, a place to meet up, then we’d be able to sit and talk, play games, and have somewhere safe to gather and stay out of trouble. I think to understand a lot of my life since, you only have to go back to those two little boys in primary school.’
So with their plan in place, Bobby approached Father McHugh and asked him if they could use the parish recreational room at the back of the presbytery to gather and play games. But the priest turned them down flat. He said the adults used it to play billiards, and the rules didn’t allow children. He suggested they ask the Archdiocese in Melbourne for a room instead. At first, Bobby was crushed by the knockback. Then he felt appalled that the church seemed to care more about its rules and its property than the parishioners it was supposed to serve – a criticism he was to make regularly in his later life, too. But he used the experience to steel his resolve instead, and come up with a solution himself.
Bobby thought long and hard about the quandary, and finally drew up a plan B. ‘We knew we could have done better with a place where more little boys could have gone and played games or at least have a refuge, but we now knew that wasn’t possible,’ he says. ‘So we then did a big BYO and DIY: fortunately there was another little boy whose parents said we could meet in their front room. So we met in there.’
It was surprising enough that a young lad and his mates would take such a novel lead in organising their lives, but what came next startled onlookers. Rather than just getting together a couple of times a week in the safety of that front room, they instead worked at hatching even more ambitious plans to keep themselves on the straight and narrow. Eventually, they came up with the idea of forming a football and cricket team and organising a series of social matches to keep them all occupied.
‘We set up our own teams and even designed our own caps and put little metal shields on them,’ says Bobby. ‘Our cricket team we named the Prahran Rovers. Then we went around the pubs and arranged matches against their social clubs. We ended up playing a few matches. We were probably all eleven, twelve and thirteen, and we lost most of them, but we had a place and an identity. We enjoyed it, and it kept us out of mischief. I think the moral of our story was that everything starts with one, then to continue you need one plus one and so on. When you’re kids, you also need an understanding adult to provide you with some kind of resources, like a place to meet.’
It was the youngster’s first taste of organising other people, and of asking for help to get a task done, and he proved surprisingly good at it. ‘I think that was really the start of my social activism,’ he says. ‘You can’t leave it to your peer group; you have to take responsibility. You’re the one who can decide whether to turn toxic and go to hell, or work out how to make life better and go well.’
The Prahran Rovers eventually pulled up stumps when Bobby grew too busy to keep organising games. As well as school, he was also doing a paper round both morning and night to earn extra cash. That might have been tough enough normally, but he didn’t even own a bicycle. Instead, he’d run from house to house, to try to finish it before the school bell rang in the morning, and to get home in time for tea in the evening.
For Bobby’s final year of primary school, he transferred to the primary school attached to the Christian Brothers’ College (CBC) at St Kilda, a well-regarded Catholic secondary college for boys established by men of the Christian Brothers’ order, who left their homes in Ireland in the nineteenth century to serve and educate the children of Irish migrants. He adjusted well but just as life seemed to be settling down, the 13-year-old faced a fresh blow.
That year, 1948, his dad James died, lung cancer finally claiming his life. It felt like another tragedy, and a release, all at the same, perplexing time. ‘Daddy was no good, a drunk, poor old Jim, but a very talented man,’ says Bob. ‘I never could work him out, and I never understood why he carried on drinking even though it was causing his family so much hardship. I wanted to understand, but he was gone before I had a chance.’
It’s a confusion that’s haunted him his whole life. Says his niece Peta, ‘His dad James gave everyone a tough time but both my mother and Bob really loved him. Despite everything, there must have been something about him. They both had a lot of affection for him. I suppose at the end of the day, he was still their father, whether he was a good father or bad.’
But even while Bobby was struggling to understand the loss, fate had yet another cruel hand to deal. His mentor Father McHugh had been working hard at the primary school, coaching basketball on a court he had laid for the children and planning a major expansion for the school, making moves to buy another property nearby. Throughout all his activities, however, he was always careful to make time for Bobby, to make sure he was coping with the deaths of his sister and father, and was managing in the face of his mother’s poor health. But in March 1949, Father McHugh went into hospital with a minor illness. A few days later, completely unexpectedly, and in only his very early sixties, his heart gave out.
For Bobby, it seemed everyone he’d ever loved, and anyone who’d ever cared for him, was being snatched away.
A young Bobby with his father, James.
At home, things were also changing fast for Bobby. His sister Eileen had married her beau Jim O’Dea and left home, and his brother Jim now did the same, with his new wife Betty. Bobby was left at the house in Prahran all alone with his mum. It could have been a good time for them both, being able to reconnect without the shadow of his father over them both. But it was too late.
His mum Annie had now turned sixty, but was a very old sixty, worn out by all the years of abuse, stress over money troubles, hard work and, of course, losing two of her children and then her husband. ‘She took it very, very hard, losing Marguerite and then Kathleen,’ says her niece Molly Langman. ‘I think it really affected her health.’ She had a stroke that left her partially paralysed down the left side of her body, unable to move her left arm and one side of her mouth, and Bobby became her carer. Legacy, the charity for dependants of former servicemen who were having a hard time, helped them out with money for school fees in the light of James’s service in both the merchant navy and the Royal Navy during World War I. In addition, Jim and Betty pitched in to pay half the rent on the house. And Bobby did all he could for his mum, in between his paper rounds and moving from the primary class of CBC into the main college. But the strain began to tell on him too.
The CBC, with around 500 boys, was a much bigger school than he’d been used to and, often in classes of up to seventy, if you fell behind, it was almost impossible to catch up. In addition, many of the boys had taken extra coaching to win government scholarships to the college to help boost its funds and, without that, Bobby found himself at an immediate disadvantage. ‘I’d never heard of French or Latin,’ he says. ‘What’s more, wi
th the maths lessons and all the algebra and geometry, and all the sciences they did, I couldn’t tell what the hell they were doing. It felt like a complete mystery.’
With all the new subjects, and probably still in shock from the loss of his sister, his dad and the priest in such quick succession, he ended up failing Year 9. He was told to repeat. Luckily for him, a sympathetic lay teacher, Jack Johnston, offered him some extra tuition, free and in his own spare time, which made all the difference. ‘He gave me a second chance, and I took it,’ Bob says. ‘The next year, I went from boiled lollies to chocolates. I ended up dux, and in top place in English.’
He was still a very quiet boy, however, subdued and a bit of a loner. One of his teachers, Brother Leo Griffin, only twenty-nine at the time he first met the boy and known for having a scholarly, gentle manner – unlike some of the more strident brothers – kept a kindly eye on him. ‘He was very quiet and very meek,’ he says. ‘He showed absolutely no sign of how he was to become later! But he was a bright student and tended towards the literary subjects. He was also friendly and cooperative. We used to have trouble with cleaners so we’d often give him a broom and he’d help us to sweep the school. He seemed to have a dysfunctional family and was lonely and liked hanging around after school rather than going home. He’d clean or play handball. It felt like he had little to go home to.’
As a result, Bobby tried to make the most of his schooldays. At his primary school they’d discovered he had a good voice, and now he found himself in increasing demand for the St Mary’s choir. With that voice growing deeper and richer all the time, the man running the choir, Brother John Murtagh, frequently asked him to take time off his lessons to take part in practice sessions and then performances.
‘All the rest of the boys had soprano voices and no bass to go with the choir,’ says Brian. ‘But Bob’s voice was deep and so we needed him. They’d make me stand next to him to try and make my voice lower. We kept sending for him and he says these days that’s why he didn’t end up with such a good education; he was too busy singing for us!’
